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I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.

Aldo Leopold

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Aldo Leopold
Age: 60 †
Born: 1887
Born: January 1
Died: 1948
Died: January 1
Academic
Author
Botanical Collector
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Forestry Scientist
Naturalist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Burlington
Iowa
Aldo Starker Leopold
Rand Aldo Leopold
Thinking
Land
Ethic
Written
Presented
Community
Evolve
Social
Ethics
Ever
Product
Nothing
Evolution
Important
Minds
Purposely
Mind
Products
Evolves

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
Aldo Leopold
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one.
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.
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If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be development to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.
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All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
Aldo Leopold
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An oak is no respecter of persons.
Aldo Leopold
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Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
Aldo Leopold
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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
Aldo Leopold
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Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
Aldo Leopold
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That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.
Aldo Leopold
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Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
Aldo Leopold
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
Aldo Leopold
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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
Aldo Leopold
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What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Aldo Leopold
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Our children are our signature to the roster of history our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it.
Aldo Leopold